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The Medieval History Journal 2008; 11; 289 DOI: 10.1177/097194580801100205 The online version of this article can be found at: http://mhj.sagepub.com

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Book Reviews
Michael C. Brose, Subjects and Masters: Uygurs in the Mongol Empire, Center for East Asian Studies, Western Washington University, Bellingham, 2007, pp. xv + 348. The Uighur Turks have long occupied a prominent place in every coherent explanation of how the thirteenth-century Mongols managed to run their unprecedentedly vast empire. The Mongols, after all, were at the beginning of their enterprise, illiterate steppe cavalrymen, hunters and herdsmen. They were hardly capable, at least initially, of administering the vast territories they acquired, which stretched uninterruptedly from Korea to Hungary, without the assistance of peoples who had relevant experience and possessed the necessary kinds of expertise. In the early stages of the imperial project, it is clear that the most significant of these were the Khitans and the Uighurs. The Khitans, a people who may well have been related to the Mongols both ethnically and linguistically, had ruled in Mongolia and north China between the tenth and the early twelfth centuries. After their eviction from China, a splinter group created the Central Asian realm of Qara-Khitai, which endured until its incorporation into the Mongol Empire in 1218. The Uighurs imperial steppe pedigree was rather older. Originally one of the component peoples of the first Turkish Empire, they had ruled in Mongolia between the mid-eighth and mid-ninth centuries, and had thereafter founded a kingdom in the Tarim basin, in what was later to become Chinese Turkestan. Their ruler, the idiqut, was a political realist who in 1209, seeing which way the wind was blowing, threw off his allegiance to Qara-Khitai and submitted to Chingis Khan: Uighuristan hence became the first part of Asia to join the Mongol Empire voluntarily. Even before that, Chingis had, on conquering his enemies the Naimans, famously acquired a Uighur scribe

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who had worked for the Naiman khan, and who had explained to Chingis what his official functions had involved. Thus it was that the Uighur script (derived from Soghdian, and thus, ultimately from points further west) came to be adopted for Mongolian, previously an unwritten language. In Inner (Chinese) Mongolia, it is still used; and in the Mongolian Republic to the north, attempts have been made since the collapse of the Soviet Union (apparently with mixed results) to reintroduce it there in place of the previously compulsory Cyrillic script. We now know a great deal more than we used to about the Khitans, their state of Qara-Khitai, and their role in the Mongol Empire. For example, Michael Birans remarkable book, The Empire of the Qara Khitai in Eurasian History. Between China and the Islamic World (Cambridge University Press, 2005) has thrown a flood of new light on the subject. Now, thanks to Dr Brose, it is the turn of the Uighurs. His book is based on a 2000, University of Pennsylvania PhD thesis; and one of the few criticisms I have of it is that at times it retains rather too much of the PhD format, especially in that the footnotes, in places, have a tendency to be interminable. However, to say that is not to deny that many readers, including this one, will find the vast number of references provided very useful. And we should at least be grateful that the notes are at the bottom of the relevant page, not relegated to infuriating endnote status. Another characteristic of the booknot, in my experience, an invariable feature of PhD theses, including my ownis that it is well and clearly written, with only a very occasional irruption of socialscientific jargon. The first words of Broses Introduction are: Who really ran the Mongol empire?a no doubt accidental echo of the title of an article I published in 1982. In that article I had concluded that the answer was: pretty well everyone except the Mongols themselvesespecially, in the early stages, the Uighurs and the Khitans, and later, members of the traditional Persian and Chinese bureaucracies. I gradually became uneasy about this formulation and in 1996 I published a partial recantation. By then I came to see it as implausible to suppose that the Mongols took no interest in the details of imperial administration; and indeed there was a good deal of evidence which showed quite clearly that they did take such an interest. But that shift in perception, if correct, did not mean that the Uighurs and the Khitans were now out of the picture: rather, it meant that their skills were indeed vigorously exploited by their Mongol masters, but in a more

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involved and informed way than I (and others) had sometimes tended to suppose. This is by no means incompatible with what Brose shows in his book. He emphasises the crucial intermediary role of the Uighurs, especially in Mongol (Yan) China; but he makes it very clear that the Mongols were always the masters. He explains clearly the social hierarchy imposed by the Mongols in China (though showing that it was by no means as rigid as has often been thought). There were four classes: in order of status, Mongols, Semuren (people of various categories), north Chinese and south Chinese. The Semuren were mostly from Western and Central Asia, or even further afield (for example, Marco Polo), and they included the Uighurs. In China, the Mongols resisted appointing the Chinese to the highest administrative posts (though they often appointed Persians to the highest position in Iran). It was the Semuren who were the principal agents of Mongol rule in China, at least at the upper levels. The author traces how individual Uighurs found their way into Mongol service. At first it was often by enlistment in the Great Khans bodyguard, the keshig, which formed a kind of nursery or training school for officials and commanders as well as a convenient repository for hostagesnot dissimilar in some respects to a medieval European kings household. The keshigs importance was long-lasting: indeed, Charles Melville has recently demonstrated (in L. Komaroff, ed., Beyond the Legacy of Genghis Khan, 2006) that it endured in the Ilkhanid Mongol khanate in Persia for much longer than we had thought. For long, Uighurs in Mongol employment undertook both civil and military functions, in accordance with the fact that in the early Mongol Empire there was little if any civil/military distinction. Later generations of Uighurs settled in China gradually came to exercise purely civil responsibilities. And many of them, while apparently never forgetting their Semuren status or their Uighur origins, came to identify with Chinese culture, some of them taking Chinese surnames, and being regarded by native Chinese scholarbureaucrats as fully acceptable figures. What the Uighurs, with their steppe pedigree and their experience of sedentary government had done was, Brose argues, to turn their knowledge and expertise into a kind of capital which ensured that they would be valued and used by their Mongol political masters (in this he follows the methodology of Michael Chamberlains Knowledge and Social Practice in Medieval Damascus, 11901350, 1994). His detailed examination
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of the careers of several generations of a number of Uighur families who served the Mongols in China shows very effectively how this worked out in practice. I have detected very few slips (one is that Yel Chucai [Yeh-l Chutsai] twice appears as Jurchen: as his name indicates, he was of Khitan origin)but I should mention that I am ignorant of Chinese, the language of most of Broses sources. I have reservations about the assumption we find here that Mongol rule in China underwent a long decline before its fall in the 1360s: in my view this very common assumption is, as is often the case in discussions of imperial decline, too dependent on hindsight. But overall this is a fascinating and enlightening book, which will be of great value to students of the history of the Mongol Empire. D.O. Morgan University of Wisconsin-Madison

Tansen Sen, Buddhism, Diplomacy and Trade: The Realignment of SinoIndian Relations, 6001400, Manohar, New Delhi, 2004, pp. xvi + 388 with 6 figures and 11 maps. Tansen Sen demonstrates in this work how to transform a PhD dissertation into a book. Divided into five chapters, of more or less similar size (Military Concerns and Spiritual Underpinnings of Tang-India Diplomacy; The Emergence of China as a Central Buddhist Realm; The Termination of the Buddhist Phase of Sino-Indian Interactions; The Reconfiguration of Sino-Indian Trade and Its Underlying Causes; The Phases and the Wider Implications of the Reconfiguration of Sino-Indian Trade), the book has also an Introduction and a Conclusion. The extensive notes and references, running for 78 pages (pp. 245322), are markers of the authors commitment to the standards of critical and analytical historical researcha point that future generations of scholars should emulate. To this reviewer and his readers Sen sends an effective message about the mutual interdependence and correlation between economic history and cultural history. Recent years have in fact, witnessed a relegation of economic history to the background in preference for the study of past cultures, in which issues of economic history are pushed to the relative

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insignificance of footnotes that readers may well choose to ignore. This book will strongly argue against this current historiographical trend and demonstrate how the two are intertwined. In fact it reminds us of what Braudel said long ago in his Aftermath of Civilization and Capitalism: in a complex society there are many ensemblespolity, economy, society and culture and one cannot be fruitfully studied without the others. Sens excellent command over his principal source language and his ability to handle epigraphic, numismatic and art-historical materials, in addition to the textual (evident from the references to primary materials), make him ideally suited to launch into this fascinating study. Coupled with this is his awareness of the historiographical setting. While there have been many enriching strides in early Indian historiography over the last four decades, most of these studies limit themselves to the confines of the modern nation state of India, or to the South Asian subcontinent. That the subcontinent was not isolated from and unconnected with Central, East, West and Southeast Asia figures relatively rarely in this historiography. The commercial and cultural linkages of early India with areas beyond the subcontinent attract the attention of scholars specialising in the early centuries of the Christian era. From the late second century B.C. to about A.D. 600 the subcontinent experienced both overland and overseas connectionscommercial and cultural as wellwith Central Asia, China and mainland and maritime Southeast Asia. The memorable role of Buddhism in fostering these linkages has received sustained scholarly interest. The apparent lack of scholars engagements with this theme for the post A.D. 600 scenario could have been due, to some extent, to the immense influence of the historiography of Indian feudalism that perceived a sharp decline in Indias long distance commerce during the 6001000/1200 phase. Sen here joins the band of historians who have critiqued the above position, which, as a historiographical formulation, has been steadily waning during the last fifteen years. It is also possible that the sharp critique of the chauvinistic claims of Hindu colonies in the Far East and the Indianisation of Southeast Asia could have acted as a disincentive to Indian scholars to delve into the study of the subject that Sen examines with a refreshing approach. If P.C. Bagchi and Xinru Liu highlighted the centrality of Buddhism (the religion of the World Conqueror and World Renouncer, to borrow the famous expression of S.J. Tambiah) in the intimate commercial and cultural linkages between India and China, the gradual fading out of
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Buddhism after ca. eighth century (save the eastern part of the subcontinent) perhaps resulted in the perception that the long history of India China contacts snapped with the decline of Buddhism from the land of its origin. It is only in the context of the renewal of the contacts in the period from the thirteenth to the early fifteenth centurythanks to the notices left behind by Chau Ju kua (Zhao Ru Gua), Marco Polo, Ibn Battuta and most importantly, Ma Huanthat one comes across a rich literature for this phase. In other words, there is a major gap in our understanding of the SinoIndian linkages for a period of five centuries spanning from the seventh to the twelfth. This is precisely the phase that Sen has illuminated in the present work. Sen closes his study at a point from where many experts, including Roderick Ptak and Haraprasad Ray, pick up their respective enquiries. Beginning with a rapid survey of the initial period of the SinoIndian contacts in the Introduction, the author in the first chapter not only enlightens us on the peaking of the SinoIndian connections during the Tang period, but also brings in the role of diplomacy (exchange of diplomatic missions) in the flowering of the relationship. This is a hallmark of Sens work, in that he expertly integrates the political/diplomatic matters with economic issues and cultural concerns. Aware of Antonino Fortes suggestion that a large number of Chinese Buddhist clergy suffered from a borderland complex, Sen elaborates in the second chapter the conscious efforts of the Chinese clergy towards the transformation of China as a legitimate part of the Buddhist world, especially the unveiling of mount Wutai as the abode of Bodhisattva Manjusri. For him Jerry H. Bentleys important concept of social conversion comes handy here, which signifies a process by which pre-modern peoples adopted or adapted foreign cultural traditions. Bentley does not intend to apply this concept in the case of an individuals spiritual or psychological experience, but rather to the broader process that resulted in the transformation of whole societies. If this implied conversion, it was conversion through voluntary association and conversion by assimilation. Backed by this conceptual tool, Sen rightly argues in the third chapter against the much cherished assumption of the decline of Buddhism in both India and China after the Tang epoch. He ably presents empirical evidence for the endurance of Buddhist doctrines in both China and India in the post-Tang phase. His excellent use of the data of the Song period demonstrates that the count of Buddhist

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monks travelling between India and China in the tenth and eleventh centuries may have surpassed the exchanges during the Tang period (p.13). The same goes for the number of translations of Indian texts into Chinese under the Song dynasty when compared with those of the previous centuries. Sen situates this in his overview of the three distinct cores of the Buddhist world since the tenth century. These were i) eastern India where under the Palas, the Devas and Chandras Vajrayana, Tantrayana Buddhism flourished; ii) Sri Lanka, which disseminated Theravada Buddhism to Myanmar and maritime Southeast Asia; and iii) China, the springboard for the spread of Buddhism to Korea, Japan and the steppes. This scenario seems to have coincided with a new pattern of long-distance commerce, both overland and overseasbut especially maritimethat bound together the western (Fatimid Egypt/Abbasid Caliphate) and the eastern (China and maritime Southeast Asia) termini of the Indian Ocean world. This new pattern witnessed what K.N. Chaudhuri labelled as segmented voyages encouraging emporia trade. This forms the bulk of the arguments of Sen in his fourth and fifth chapters. His major contributions here are his narratives of the vibrancy of the SinoIndian contacts in spite of the diminished role of Buddhism in fostering this trade. He cites cases of the transactions in non-religious items and trade in bulk goods that was distinct from the previous exchange system largely driven by items relevant to the Buddhist world. Taking his cue from the Polanyi model, Sen postulates that SinoIndian commerce was moving towards a largescale and market-centred interaction (p. 14). To this he adds the diplomatic efforts on the parts of the Chinese (Song, Yuan and Ming rulers) and Indian (especially the Cholas of south India) political powers which were aware of the profits and advantages accruing to this trade. The author situates the tremendous expansion of SinoIndian commerce and diplomacy in the overall background of the thirteenth century world system which, according to J. Abu-Lughod, contained no single hegemonic power (the Western European circuit, drawing its sustenance from the eastern Mediterranean marketsthanks to the role of Egypt as a hinge between the Indian Ocean and the Mediterraneanwas, in view of AbuLughod, upstart and peripheral). For this reviewer the reading of chapters four and five has been particularly rewarding. To Sen goes the credit of discussing the role of the Sogdian merchants (in the light of the so called Ancient Letters of Sogdian traders) in Central Asia, China and the northernmost part of Kashmir,
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dealing in gold, musk, pepper, camphor and silk (fourth and eighth centuries A.D.). He also highlights the donations of Indian merchants from the famous Central Asian Buddhist site at Dunhuang. What is especially notable is his discussion of the role of Muslim merchants in the China south India commercial contacts. The three Chola tributary missions in 1014, 1033 and 1077 all point to the sustained Chola interests in maintaining commercial links with China and in utilising diplomatic channels to keep the goods flowing. The first Chola mission included Pu Jiaxin, second in command to the Chief envoy Sha (Po)lisanwen (Cholisamudra). Pu Jiaxin has been identified with Abu Kasim who must have belonged to the Arab Islamic mercantile community engaging in maritime trade with China from the Coromandel coast (Maabar of Arabic and Persian accounts). Another Muslim merchant, Pu Yatoli (Abu Adil), figures in the Song chronicles as being the leader of the second Chola mission in 1033. Could these Muslim merchants have been labelled as Anjuvannam in Tamil inscriptions? This is a point suggested by Abraham, but a further analysis from Sen on this subject was appropriate here. The very active role of the Tamil mercantile groups (500 svamis of Ayyavole, the Manigramam, the Nanadesi) in the Coromandel trade with maritime and mainland Southeast Asia and China receives due attention from the author. The book under review came out shortly after Noburu Karashima edited Ancient and Medieval Commercial Activities in the Indian Ocean: Testimony of Inscriptions and Ceramic Sherds, in 2002, and therefore it was possibly not available for Sen when he prepared his manuscript. This book gives a comprehensive study of the inscriptions of Tamil mercantile groups and shows the major presence of Tamil merchants in areas vital to the sea-borne commerce in the eastern sector of the Indian Ocean. The cultural world of these merchants looms large in these inscriptions, especially the bilingual records. Sen discusses the trade in Chinese and Indonesian camphor; this is further illuminated by a fresh study (previously examined by Nilakantha Sastri) of the 1088 Tamil inscription from Barus, famous for the availability of camphor, in Karashimas volume. Sen could have utilised more the evidence of Zhao Ru Gua who spoke not only of important commercial centres but also referred to commodities which were significant for the notice of a Song customs officer like him. While camphor was a regular ingredient of Brahmanical rituals (Kadamba rulers of Goa claimed in their inscriptions that they voyaged

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to Somanatha from Gopakapattana to offer camphor to the famous Saiva shrine), imported camphor yielded handsome customs to the port authorities of Aden, as the late thirteenth-century account of Aden by Ibn Mujawir tells us (for a review article of Karashimas volume see Ranabir Chakravarti, Trade and Traders in Early Indian Society, 2007, chapter 11). The author has made excellent use of all available primary materials to suggest the famous Chola naval expedition (1025) to Kadaram, Sri Vijaya and other nine places in Southeast Asia was largely prompted by the keen Chola interests in reducing the importance of Sri Vijaya in the maritime trade between Song China and Coromandel. He has ably countered Spencers position that the Chola expedition was a manifestation of the politics of plunder, a formulation Spencer sought to situate in the controversial model of segmentary state of the Cholas. This reviewer expected that the author would have delved deeper into the politically sponsored rise of the port of Visakahapattinam during the reign of Kulottunga I (10701120). This port was renamed Kulottungacholapattinam, obviously after the reigning Chola king. Kulottunga is also known to have remitted the customs duties (sunka/sunga), obviously to encourage and promote overseas commerce. He is also credited with having established a dynastic marriage with the ruler of Pagan. Is it because the Chola influence over maritime Southeast Asia had somewhat waned when Kulottunga occupied the Chola throne in 1070? Significantly enough, Zhao Ru Gua noted that one of the ways to reach Chu-lien (the Chola country) from China was through Pu-kan (Pagan). Was Kulottunga looking for an alternative route to reach south China through Pagan and the YunnanBhamo overland route, as the Chola political prominence in maritime South east Asia and Sri Lanka slid after the end of Rajendras reign in 1044? Sen has duly discussed the importance of the overland route that connected Southwest China and northern parts of Myanmar and further stretched to northeastern parts of India through Kamarupa. But he is strangely silent about the emergence of the Chittagong region (Bangladesh) as a major port after the tenth century. This celebrated port figures in the Arabic and Persian accounts as Samandar and Sudkawan; Haraprasad Rays study demonstrates that the Ming fleet of Zeng he visited this port at least four times in the fifteenth century. Samandar/Sudkawan/Chittagong stood at the easternmost extremity of the Ganga delta and thereby offered linkages with both the Arakan and the Irawaddy deltas on the one hand, and with the northeastern part of India on the other. A considerable part
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of the YunnanBhamo overland route became integrated with the maritime and fluvial network in the easternmost section of the Ganga delta. It is also of significance that this region has yielded the famous Jhewari hoard of bronze Buddhist images. Sen has argued that the failure of the new Buddhist doctrines from India to have any discernible impact on Chinese clergy despite the unprecedented exchanges and volume of the translation seem to be more poignant (p. 14). As he rightly identified eastern India as one of the last bastions of Buddhism in India, would he consider the point whether there were few takers on the Chinese side for the esoteric Vajrayana, Tantrayana and Sahajayana sects of Buddhism? The reviewer would like to concur with Sens concluding sentence: Thus, while SinoIndian interactions continued to be impressive in the first half of the second millennium, the process of social conversion and syncretism that marked the preceding Buddhist phase of SinoIndian interactions failed to recur (p. 243). Ranabir Chakravarti Centre for Historical Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University New Delhi

Maria Hayward, Dress at the Court of Henry VIII (The Wardrobe Book of the Wardrobe of the Robes prepared by James Worsley in December 1516, edited from Harley MS 2284, and his Inventory prepared on 17 January 1521, and from Harley MS 4217, both in the British Library, with a Commentary by Maria Hayward), W.S. Maney & Son Ltd., Leeds, 2007, pp. 458. This book represents a milestone in the history of dress. Maria Hayward has compiled a book which demonstrates clearly what an important role dress played at the Tudor court and how sources such as portrait paintings or the wardrobe inventories are to be used with care and intelligence. She approaches her subject in the broadest terms, which makes the volume useful for historians interested in a number of topics, from symbolic politics, court life, gender, childhood, crafts and trade, to hygienethat is to say, not merely historians of costume. It is divided into twenty

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chapters, which are followed by the edition of the Harley manuscripts and a glossary. Thanks to this glossary and the precise description of costumes alongside a great number of illustrations, the book can easily serve as a guide to Tudor costume analysis even for beginners. It beautifully complements Janet Arnolds work on Elizabeths wardrobe. Since Haywards book includes a chapter on Henry VIIs costume, almost the entire sixteenth century is now to be regarded as expertly covered. From a comparative perspective, this is a major scholarly achievement. Hayward shows that Henry VIII, like Francis I, regarded clothes as integral to the creation of magnificence. Magnificence was regarded as a key political virtue in Burgundian court culture and justice was seen to depend on it. Clothes, furnishings and jewellery thus became tools to legitimise and glorify particular rulers who had the necessary wealth to pay for precious silks (in contrast to Maximilian I, for instance) and access such sumptuous material. The great wardrobe had become a fixed institution of the English court in the late fifteenth century, and Hayward provides a detailed account of how it was organised during Henrys thirtyeight year long reign. It was much to his advantage that the king was considered to be extremely handsome and well proportioned in his youth. Hayward includes extremely interesting snippets of information throughout the volumeas in her reference to a male youth culture sponsored by the court in 1510, when twenty-four young men appeared for a feast in the Almain, German fashion, all in slashed yellow satin garments and yellow feathers on their bonnets. This already shows how much care went into clothing as a display of general magnificence, of political loyalty, or more particular sentiments, such as mourning (blue for the king, so as to distinguish him from the rest of the court in black), joy or gaiety. As the king aged, he turned into the bulky figure that is most familiar now, his stature accentuated by layers of clothing and broad shoulders, while it was remarked that three of the biggest men to be found could get inside his doublet. Henry took care that his image was always displayed in formal attire, in contrast to Francis I. Seven types of images of him circulated, which however did not reflect the full diversity of his wardrobe. Hayward does believe that even though Henry had a long period in which he wore dresses slashed in the German manner and by 1547 had a range of foreign styles in his wardrobe, there nonetheless existed an English style. It was marked by a preference for bright, clear colours, even though good black cloth also featured abundantly, a specific
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use of fur for warmth and status, the bulky layered look for men and low necklines for women. Hayward includes a comprehensive and highly interesting discussion of female attire of relatives and queens. The English clearly associated a square low neckline for women with beauty and sufficient decorum (in contrast to the Italian manner, which often revealed parts of the shoulder as well). This seems to present the key reason why the king was so disappointed by Anne of Cleve, who wore high-necked gowns in the German and Flemish fashion to display modesty, which he thought was heavy. Anne, for her part, did not recognise the king when he rode out to greet her excitedly, and it was only when he changed into a purple robe (the wearing of purple being one of his privileges) that she chose to recognise him. Clothes, in other words, were necessary to authenticate a man of rank; they constituted him as an office-holder. Even so, the royal wardrobe was in a state of permanent circulation. It was not collected and nothing remains extant. Ritual gift giving of used items extended to the nobility, so as to remember Henry loyally; many other pieces and jewellery were constantly re-used and re-set. Men closely associated with the court of course differed in the amount of attention they devoted to dress, and Hayward presents a fascinating discussion of Cardinal Wolseys high concern with appearances. This could result in an unwanted competition over magnificence as a display of virtue which was to such an extent materially performed; thus, a Venetian ambassador remarked in 1516 that Wolsey was in fact ipse rex. Haywards book, in other words, provides a remarkably rich account of politics and the use of symbols in a key period of European history and it deserves to be read widely. Ulinka Rublack St Johns College, Cambridge

Raziuddin Aquil, Sufism, Culture, and Politics. Afghans and Islam in Medieval North India, Oxford University Press, New Delhi, 2007, pp. xi + 268. The hundred years of Indian history (c. 1450c.1550) covered in this book deserve serious scholarly attention for many reasons. The century,

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sandwiched between the collapse of the Delhi Sultanate and the reestablishment of the Mughal Empire, tends to get overlooked owing to an almost complete absence of historical annals in Persian, the language of administration and high culture. Yet, on the basis of sources of a somewhat later period, that is numismatic and other documents dating to the late sixteenth and early seventeenth centuries, one manages to get a sense of the changes which followed the rise of a new ethnic group to state power, a downturn in fiscal and monetary movements during the fifteenth century and the diffusion among the common people of ideas about religion and society. There has been an interesting debate on the nature of polity and the ability of the Afghan tribal confederacy to craft political institutions suitable for a centralised state. R.P. Tripathi and John F. Richards have highlighted the decentralised nature and diminished economic strength of the Lodi state, whereas Iqtidar Husain Siddiqui has argued in favour of Afghan Despotism. The debate dovetails with the issue of the comparative strength of the Afghan and Mughal polities and the triumph of one over the other. It is correct to assume that the question of religion is important insofar as it played a role in carving out legitimacy and securing popular acceptance of either regime. Raziuddin Aquils book is an important intervention in this debate, equipped as he is with good linguistic skills and a combative style. However its central problematic, namely, the relationship between polity, warfare and empire building (the Mongol theory of kingship and Sher Shahs triumph over the Mughals) is presented to the reader only at the end of a hundred pages. More than that, he avoids engagement with any substantial arguments and chooses to focus on some interesting, though ultimately rather inconsequential matters of fate and tactical errors. Aquil was expected to transcend the miscellaneous assemblage of contingent circumstances to bring out underlying structures, but he prefers to adopt a processual view of history. The discussion in the Introduction takes us back and forth into pre-Afghan and post-Mughal histories, with some violence to chronological arrangements as well as the processual approach itself. Such an approach does require a nuanced understanding of the making and progress of institutions and ideas. It escapes Aquils attention, for instance, that the political and fiscal bases of the north Indian polity in the thirteenth century were weak (the tributary system kept Balbans nobles perpetually in debt to moneylenders, sahukars),
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and gained strength only in the fourteenth century as a result of wide ranging measures of the Khalji regime. Aquil does admit that his work draws upon no new material (p. 42), but promises us something new and different out of whatever we have read so far. His critical handling of the sources is commendable although the absence of detachment while assessing events (he takes sides between historical characters, let alone between historians) tends to make the reader wary of his assertions. For instance, Aquil is critical not only of most contemporary and modern historians of Mughal India, he is also, rather strangely, contemptuous of the Mughals. While he is sensitive to the notion of a politics of memory, which political regimes create and draw upon to reaffirm their power, his repeated criticism of Mughal sources on the Afghans (p. 32) ignores Abul Fazls innumerable references to Sher Shahs pioneering efforts to restructure the military, fiscal and monetary organs of the state which were taken up as a model by Akbar. Moreover, the assertion that Afghan nobles were marginalised in the Mughal Empire is not borne out by existing studies of the higher bureaucracy under the Mughals during the seventeenth century. Aquils attitude toward Sufic sources tends to be uncritical, especially as he does not differentiate between authentic texts and forgeries (pp. 58). It is obvious that forged texts cannot be used as sources unless one is certain about their origins and when they were composed. The claim that all forged texts belong to a time before the appearance of Siyarul Auliya (written, incidentally, much later than c. 1356) is never substantiated. The assertion that Sufic sources have not been used in modern historiography because Marxists are sceptical of their value is questionable, in view of Professor Mohammad Habibs pioneering use of them. The first two chapters (The Making of a Badshah and Mughal Afghan Interface: Battles and Mobilization) narrate the events leading to the establishment of the second Afghan Empire with Sher Shah Sur as the ruler. The minute details of political alignments and conflicts are ably synthesised from well-known sources, both primary and secondary. One would still like to ask what MughalAfghan Interface means here. The third chapter (Norms of Governance and Aspects of Administration) is a general discussion of Islamic political thought found in normative texts written in the Persianate world. The notion of a benevolent and just (p. 119) king as ideal sovereign is so universal that its specific relevance to a finely grained understanding of the Afghan polity remains an open

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question. The closest one gets to the mark is the statement that, [I]t is difficult to get direct evidence of the influence of the early Muslim political theorists on Sher Shahs ideals, even though we know that some of the classical texts were known in this period (p. 130). The inference that the Afghan Sultans were later remembered as religious minded and generous to religious institutions also does not take us far. Alauddin Khalji, for instance, was seen as a tyrant during his lifetime, to be later transformed into a saint when devotees thronged his tomb to offer prayers and to practice the popular ritual of tying a thread (Khairul Majalis, ed., pp. 24142). The transformation of an image in popular memory is a complex subject, difficult to handle through the methodology adopted in this book. The second part of the chapter is on the administrative apparatus and draws heavily on secondary sources. No new interpretations are put forward and the views of Parmatma Saran and Iqtidar Siddiqui seem to hold sway. It is somewhat difficult to link this section with the earlier part of the chapter; moreover, one misses here some discussion of the language of administration. The Sur bureaucracy kept records in two languages at the level of the pargana, the most significant locus of negotiations between the local and central authorities. Sher Shahs use of the local language (Hindvi, north Indian languages and dialects written in the Devanagari script) was a departure from the previous Afghan practice and a measure of his practical sense. The number of parganas was large (Waqiat i Mushtaqi, ed., p. 127, although the figure is exaggerated and may have been of villages) and the significance of this measure on the class of scribes and accountants specialising in the Indian system of record keeping (as opposed to the competing Iranian system) cannot be underestimated. A slip in the footnote on page 125 suggests that Aquil needs to examine with greater care the technical terminology of the time. The zakat on grain that Sikandar Lodi abolished was not a religious cess involving the payment of corn in zakat, but a royal tax on grain trade. Such a tax increased prices and so was abolished in time of famine. Prohibiting the distribution of grain in charity could hardly have helped famine victims! John F. Richards has drawn our attention to the link between the structure of polity, fiscalit and monetary management in the case of the Afghans. Sher Shah had revived the cash-nexus along with tri-metallic
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coinage of the early Delhi Sultans, while the Lodis had continued with the billoncopper regime of the later Sultans (Ibrahim also decreed fiscal collection in grain rather than money). A discussion of the two sets of circumstances would have encouraged a differentiated view of the Afghan polity; Aquil however does not explain the reasons for rejecting the views of Richards, Simon Digby and the reviewer on the subject of precious metal coinage in the Lodi kingdom (pp. 1820). His observation (p. 20) that the Lodis did mint gold and silver coins but these were demonetised and taken out of circulation remains unsubstantiated as no text mentions gold or silver coins issued by the Lodis either directly or indirectly. Numismatists searching endlessly for tanka i nuqra have invariably had to be content with tanka i siyah (monnaie noire). Inter-community relations are explored in the chapter on The Afghans and the Rajputs: Conflict and Accommodation. Aquils characterisation of scholars who work on religious identity as irenic seems arbitrary, following from which many of the views he attributes to particular historians sound like extreme positions and are not always justified (for example, pp. 14344 where contrary statements given by the same historians are scrupulously avoided). Curiously, one of the most influential works written from a nationalist perspective, Tara Chands Influence of Islam on Indian Culture is neither cited nor does it appear in the bibliography. Aquil argues that the Sufis played a greater role in state politics than has generally been ascribed to them (The Political and the Sufic Wilayat and Sufi Traditions and Hindu Muslim Relations). According to him they were revered by rulers and subjects alike, indeed the former coveted their support also out of fear: The sources mention several anecdotes in which a reigning king was removed from the throne by the Sufi saint, and kingship was bestowed on... a more deserving person (p. 27). Such an understanding, according to the author, is made possible by a more imaginative reading of hagiographical sources, something that has not been done so far (pp. 58). Malfuzat (conversations) and tazkiras (biographies) are held to offer a rich collection of historical data for an analysis of societal and mental structure, and power and process, besides presenting a bottom up radiation of the perceptions of the disgruntled elites and the depressed commoners. How much of the historical data contained in this genre of sources is authentic, by any critical standards, is another question.

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The argument that the Sufis conferred legitimacy on political rule for personal gain and that rulers sought their blessings for acquiring such legitimacy draws upon a tension between accepting the rhetorical prestige of a hagiographical anecdote and its historical value as a factual account.
Whether a Sufi actually prophesised or prayed on behalf of a Sultan or not, the repeated mention of these episodes in the various contemporary [sic.] accounts is an indicator of the importance attached to these acts, the importance of the Sufi in the society and how crucial it was for the Sultan to be perceived to be having the backing of a religious person of the stature of a well known Sufi, and thereby gaining legitimacy and respect from the subjects. The psychological gains were immense to the king or the aspirer who could justify his ambition to acquire the kingdom by stating that he was blessed by a certain wali, or friend of God (p. 182)

Yet it appears difficult to find an instance of a ruler who claimed to have been placed on the throne through a Sufis blessings, whatever the Sufic hagiographies may claim. More to the point here would have been a statement on ideological justifications given by the Sufis in support of one or the other contending political faction. This would still beg the question of how far individual Sufisas against Sufism in general were influential enough to cause shifts of opinion within the dominant Muslim groups. The construction of arguments in the book is admirably tight and the narrative retains its focus on both individuals and circumstances. The author seems inclined to cite from a wide range of secondary sources even when his references do not at first glance appear to be directly linked to the narrative. While at times the quotations apparently have a more rhetorical function within the narrative, at other times where an explanation for the term used in the text appears necessary (such as Sher Shah fixed four badrahs as his monthly salary, p. 110), none is provided. Similarly, the norm that standard editions of texts wherever available are to be cited, in place of manuscripts, is also not often adhered to. Though Aquil assures the reader in the Preface that he has followed with some modifications the transliteration system of F. Steingass, in fact no diacritical marks are used, and so, no real system of transliteration has been followed in the book. The book fills a gap in the history of medieval Indian politics and religion. The wealth of details it provides on military conflicts, alignment
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of factions and Sufic activities makes it a required reading for researchers. The absence of a central or subordinate argument will still be very much regretted. On the whole Raziuddin Aquil should have exercised greater care in matters of methodological rigour and precision in formulation, if he really wished to achieve success as a typical Afghan historian in his Quixotic battle against many an academic mogul (Preface, p. xi). Najaf Haider Centre for Historical Studies Jawaharlal Nehru University, New Delhi

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